Interactive GuideGPSExternal loadAcceleration

GPS Acceleration Metrics: What All 23 Actually Mean

GPS acceleration metrics explained: what all 23 columns in your export measure, which five to report, and which to drop. Start with the five-metric panel.

Updated 27 August 2026first published 25 August 2026

External load

What GPS acceleration metrics actually measure

They measure three things: how often an athlete changed speed, how hard, and over what distance. Every column in the acceleration block is one of those three, in a different unit or at a narrower intensity.

Quick answer

A GPS export typically carries around 23 acceleration and deceleration metrics, and they resolve to five families: counts, rates, peaks, distances, and intensity bands. Most of the 23 are the same session cut a different way. Five metrics carry the signal: accel + decel efforts, accel + decel efforts per minute, deceleration efforts, high deceleration efforts, and max deceleration.

GPS acceleration metrics describe how often an athlete changed speed, how hard, and over what distance. That is the whole list. Everything else in the acceleration block of your export is one of those three questions asked in a different unit, or filtered to a narrower intensity. Once you can name which question a column is answering, deciding whether to report it takes about five seconds.

Acceleration

Rate of change of speed, in metres per second squared. It is not speed. An athlete at 3 m/s² is adding three metres per second to their speed, every second.

Example: A standing start to 6 m/s in two seconds averages 3 m/s².

Deceleration

Acceleration with a negative sign. Braking. Providers report it either as a negative number or as a separate positive column, which is worth checking before you build any calculation on it.

Example: Slowing from 7 m/s to a standstill in one second is roughly -7 m/s².

Effort

Not an instant. An effort is a period spent above a threshold, held for a minimum duration. Both of those settings are decisions someone made, and both change the count.

Example: The same sprint counts as one effort at 0.4s minimum duration and zero at 1.0s.

That last definition is the one that catches people out. An effort count looks like an objective measurement of what happened on the pitch. It is a measurement of what happened past a line somebody drew. Move the line and the number moves with it, which is why the next section comes before the glossary rather than after it.

Comparability

Why your acceleration counts don't match anyone else's

Two settings decide the number, and most reports never state either one.

Every acceleration effort count depends on two choices. The threshold decides how hard a change of speed has to be before it counts. The minimum effort duration decides how long the athlete has to hold it. Neither is standardised, and the research is no better than the industry here.

124

Studies reviewed on acceleration quantification

Delves and colleagues screened the elite team-sport literature from 2010 to 2020.

32.3%

Reported a minimum effort duration

Forty of the 124. The most common setting was 0.5 seconds, used in 18 studies.

12.9%

Reported how they filtered the signal

Sixteen of the 124. The rest published counts you cannot reproduce.

The size of that effect is easy to underestimate. Global Performance Insights, reporting work by Silva and colleagues, found that applying a minimum effort duration of 0.2 to 0.3 seconds removed roughly 64% of acceleration and deceleration efforts from a dataset. Only 36% of accelerations and 34% of decelerations survived the filter. Same sessions, same athletes, two thirds of the efforts gone because of a setting.

Move the acceleration threshold

2.0 m/s²3.5 m/s²

Between 2.5 and 3.0 m/s² is where most of the published work sits. Harper and colleagues used 2.5 m/s² as their high-intensity cut-off across a meta-analysis of elite team sport, and several providers ship 3.0 as a default.

What to do about it

Pick a threshold and a minimum effort duration, write them down, and never change them mid-season. Your numbers do not need to match another club's. They need to be comparable to your own numbers from three weeks ago, which is the only comparison that changes a session.

Delves RIM, Aughey RJ, Ball K, Duthie GM. The quantification of acceleration events in elite team sport: a systematic review. Sports Medicine – Open 2021;7:45. Minimum effort duration figures via Global Performance Insights, “Defining high-speed, acceleration and deceleration efforts in sport”, reporting Silva et al. 2023.

Reference

All 23 acceleration metrics, grouped by what they do

Grouped by function rather than alphabetically, because the useful question is which of these is the same number twice.

Counts: how many efforts

Seven metrics, all answering the same question at different intensities. Reporting more than two or three of these puts the same information on the page repeatedly.

Metric	Unit	What it tells you
Accel + Decel Efforts	efforts	Every effort past the threshold in both directions, added together. The one number to use if you only report one.
Acceleration Efforts	efforts	How many times the athlete crossed the acceleration threshold. Volume of speeding up.
Deceleration Efforts	efforts	How many times they braked harder than the threshold. In football this is usually the bigger of the two.
High Acceleration Efforts	efforts	Accelerations in the high-intensity band only. Strips out the gentle changes of pace.
Max Acceleration Efforts	efforts	Accelerations in the top band. Counts are small, so a single session says little. Read it weekly.
High Deceleration Efforts	efforts	Decelerations in the high-intensity band. The braking equivalent, and the one most club reports leave out.
Max Deceleration Efforts	efforts	The hardest braking band. Tiny counts, high mechanical cost per repetition.

Rates: how often per minute

The same counts divided by session minutes. This is the group that turns volume into intensity, and it is the group most often missing from club reports.

Metric	Unit	What it tells you
Accelerations Per Minute	efforts/min	Acceleration efforts divided by session minutes. Makes a 25-minute rondo and a 90-minute match comparable.
Decelerations Per Minute	efforts/min	Braking rate. Climbs in small-sided games, where the pitch is short and every run ends early.
Accel + Decel Efforts Per Minute	efforts/min	Combined rate. The cleanest single intensity number in the whole acceleration block.

Peaks and intensity: how hard

Magnitudes rather than counts. These describe the sharpest moment of a session, or its average sharpness, rather than how much of it there was.

Metric	Unit	What it tells you
Max Acceleration	m/s²	The single hardest acceleration in the session. A capacity marker, not a load marker.
Max Deceleration	m/s²	Hardest braking effort. Sensitive to neuromuscular fatigue, which is what makes it worth trending.
Acceleration Density	m/s²	The average of every acceleration and braking value across the period, ignoring direction. It never touches a threshold, so it can't be gamed by one.

Acceleration density is worth a note. Providers use the name inconsistently: Catapult documents acceleration density as acceleration load over time and keeps a separate acceleration density index for load per 10 metres of distance. If your export gives it in m/s², it is an average of absolute acceleration values, which is the version described above. Check what your file is actually giving you before you trend it.

Distances: how far while changing speed

Metres accumulated inside an intensity band. These separate a long rolling build-up from a short violent one, which a count treats as identical.

Metric	Unit	What it tells you
High Acceleration Distance	m	Metres covered while accelerating in the high band. A long build-up and a short burst read differently here, and identically in a count.
Max Acceleration Distance	m	Metres covered in the top acceleration band. Usually a fraction of the high-band figure.
High Deceleration Distance	m	Metres covered while braking in the high band.
Max Deceleration Distance	m	Metres covered in the hardest braking band. Short by nature, because hard braking ends quickly.

Gen 2 bands: the same efforts, sorted

Gen 2 is Catapult's second-generation acceleration processing. Instead of counting everything past one threshold, it sorts efforts into three acceleration bands and three deceleration bands. B1 to B3 refers to those bands, so B2-3 means the two harder ones and B3 means the hardest alone.

Metric	Unit	What it tells you
Acceleration B1-3 Efforts (Gen 2)	efforts	Every Gen 2 acceleration effort across all three bands. The band-system version of total acceleration efforts.
Deceleration B1-3 Efforts (Gen 2)	efforts	Every Gen 2 deceleration effort across all three bands.
Acceleration B2-3 Efforts (Gen 2)	efforts	The two higher acceleration bands only. Drops band 1, where most of the noise sits.
Deceleration B2-3 Efforts (Gen 2)	efforts	The two hardest braking bands. A reasonable stand-in for high-intensity deceleration efforts.
Deceleration B3 Efforts (Gen 2)	efforts	Band 3 alone, the hardest braking there is. Expect single digits.
Acceleration B1-3 Distance (Gen 2)	m	Metres covered while performing Gen 2 acceleration efforts across all bands.

Two practical notes on bands. The boundaries are configurable, so a band 3 effort at your club is not a band 3 effort at the club down the road unless you both set the same numbers. And Catapult does not allow a band to run down to zero, because the acceleration signal is noisy around zero and a band anchored there would count sensor drift as effort.

Band structure and acceleration density definitions per Catapult support documentation. Band configuration is club-specific by design, so treat any published band count as uncomparable unless the thresholds are stated alongside it.

Braking load

Do athletes decelerate more than they accelerate?

In football, clearly yes, and by a margin most reporting does not reflect.

Most club reports lead with accelerations. The evidence says the braking side carries more of the volume and much more of the mechanical cost, which makes the habit hard to defend once you have seen the numbers.

80-104%

More high-intensity decelerations than accelerations

Professional soccer match play: 51 to 65 high-intensity decelerations against 27 to 35 accelerations.

2.7x

Ground reaction force in the braking steps

Up to 2.7 times the force of the matching acceleration steps. Around 58 N/kg against 21 N/kg for a 75 kg athlete.

<50 ms

Time to absorb the impact peak

High peak forces arrive in the first 10 to 40% of stance and have to be dissipated in under 50 milliseconds.

Harper and colleagues found soccer had the largest gap between deceleration and acceleration demands of any sport in their review, and the gap widened at the higher intensity band. American football was the only sport that ran the other way. The same group identifies intense horizontal deceleration as a common inciting event before non-contact ACL injury, though the review stops short of putting a percentage on it, and so should you.

What this changes in your report

Split accelerations and decelerations rather than reporting the combined figure alone. If a player's combined count holds steady while the braking half climbs, the combined number has hidden the thing you needed to see. That split costs you one extra row.

Harper DJ, Carling C, Kiely J. High-intensity acceleration and deceleration demands in elite team sports competitive match play: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Sports Medicine 2019;49(12):1923–1947. Harper DJ, McBurnie AJ, Dos'Santos T, et al. Biomechanical and neuromuscular performance requirements of horizontal deceleration. Sports Medicine 2022;52(10):2321–2354. High intensity defined as greater than 2.5 m/s², very high as greater than 3.5 m/s².

The verdict

Which acceleration metrics should you actually report?

Five: accel + decel efforts, accel + decel efforts per minute, deceleration efforts, high deceleration efforts, and max deceleration. Everything else duplicates one of those at a different cut.

Report these five

Accel + decel efforts. Your volume headline. One number for total mechanical work, comparable week to week.
Accel + decel efforts per minute. Your intensity headline. Without it a short sharp session looks lighter than a long easy one.
Deceleration efforts, reported separately. The braking half moves independently of the accelerating half, so a combined figure can hide it.
High deceleration efforts. Where the mechanical cost concentrates. Small numbers, so read the weekly total rather than the daily one.
Max deceleration. A neuromuscular fatigue signal. Trend it across the week and watch for a drop rather than reading any single value.

Drop these, and say why

Any count you already report at a different intensity cut. High, max and total acceleration efforts are one metric with three filters.
Max-band distances when your squad produces single-digit counts in that band. There is not enough signal to trend.
Acceleration efforts per minute and decelerations per minute alongside the combined rate. Pick the combined one unless you have a specific question about a direction.
Gen 2 band counts if you also report threshold-based counts. They answer the same question in a second vocabulary.
Any metric nobody has looked at in six weeks. If it has never changed a session, it is furniture.

The speed half of the export gets the same treatment in our guide to GPS speed and distance metrics, from the thresholds behind high speed running to the five worth reporting.

One thing none of the 23 can tell you: how the athlete felt about any of it. Two players can produce an identical acceleration profile and arrive at Tuesday in completely different states. That is the difference between external and internal load, and it is why a GPS panel works better sitting next to session RPE and wellness than on its own.

In Fractall

Where the acceleration data lands

One acceleration metric, charted properly, beside the rest of the athlete's record.

Fractall doesn't sell GPS units and doesn't try to reproduce all 23 columns. The GPS module reads the CSV your provider already produces and charts six external load metrics out of the box: distance, high speed running, sprint distance, accel + decel efforts, max velocity and player load. Accel + decel efforts is the acceleration metric, on the argument this article just made, and a metric picker opens the wider catalog when you need it. Charting one well beats charting 23 badly.

From provider export to squad chart

Run your normal post-session export. Catapult, STATSports, Oliver Sports and WIMU files are read directly, and columns from other providers can be mapped to Fractall's metrics manually when you bring the file in.

Drop the CSV into the GPS tab and link the athlete names in your file to your Fractall squad. You do that once, then every later import lines up on its own.

Sessions get labelled MD-3, MD-1, MD, MD+1 and charted together, so this week's accel + decel load sits next to last week's and next to the athlete's RPE and wellness.

Fractall microcycle volume chart comparing distance, high speed distance, accel plus decel efforts, sprint distance and max velocity across a full matchday cycle — Accel + decel efforts charted beside the other five metrics across a full microcycle. Demo team data.

The reason to put it here rather than leave it in the provider portal is comparison. An acceleration count is close to meaningless in isolation and useful the moment it sits next to the same session three weeks ago, which is the same argument for comparing microcycles in the first place.

Import the export you already have

Drop your Catapult, STATSports, Oliver Sports or WIMU CSV into Fractall and chart accel + decel efforts across the microcycle, beside RPE and wellness. Four-week free trial, no card.

Start a free trial

FAQs

Common questions about GPS acceleration metrics

How many accelerations should a player do in a session?

There is no external benchmark worth chasing, because the number depends entirely on the threshold and minimum effort duration your provider applies. Compare an athlete against their own rolling average and against the squad on the same day, using the same settings. A club running a 2.0 m/s² threshold and a club running 3.5 m/s² are not measuring the same thing.

Should I use absolute or individualised acceleration thresholds?

Absolute thresholds are easier to run and easier to explain, and they are what almost all published research uses. Individualised thresholds set as a percentage of each athlete's maximum describe the demand on that athlete more fairly, at the cost of needing a reliable maximum for everyone. Start absolute. Move to individualised when you have maximums you trust for the whole squad.

What does Gen 2 mean in my GPS export?

Gen 2 is Catapult's second-generation acceleration processing, which sorts efforts into three acceleration bands and three deceleration bands instead of counting everything past a single threshold. B1 to B3 refers to those bands. The band boundaries are set by whoever configured your account, so they are not comparable across clubs.

Why are my deceleration counts higher than my accelerations?

Because in football they usually are. Harper and colleagues found professional soccer players perform 80 to 104 percent more high-intensity decelerations than accelerations in match play. If your accelerations are consistently the higher number, check whether your provider applies different thresholds to the two directions.

Do I need GPS to monitor training load?

No. Session RPE multiplied by session duration gives you a defensible internal load figure with no hardware at all, and it is where most small clubs should start. GPS adds what the athlete did, not how they responded to it. Clubs that run both get the fuller picture, and clubs that run neither are guessing.

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